Dr. Nicola Irene Riley, 46, was arrested Wednesday night on murder charges for allegedly performing numerous late-term abortions in New Jersey and Maryland, including one botched abortion in 2010. The case is the first of its kind in Maryland; the two doctors have been charged for a fetal homicide statute.

“They have been indicted based upon a fetal homicide statute.This is probably the first case that Maryland has ever seen with this factual scenario using this statute. It’s a unique situation,” Maryland State Attorney Ellis Rollins told Reuters in an interview.

Riley, a family physician, was hired by Dr. Steven Chase Brigham, 55, to help perform late-term abortions. Investigators say those abortions were started in New Jersey then the pregnant women drove themselves across state lines to Maryland where the abortions were completed. Investigators believe the abortions were completed in Maryland because the state’s abortion law is less restrictive than in nearby states.

“They would start the abortions up in New Jersey, inject them with saline to kill the fetus, then bring them down in vans the next day to complete the abortion,” said Nancy Jacobs, Maryland State Senator.

Investigators believe Brigham hired Riley because she is licensed to practice medicine in the state of Maryland while he is not.

The investigation into the abortions began when an 18-year-old woman who was 21 weeks pregnant was hospitalized after a botched abortion; her uterus was ruptured and bowels extended. She had to undergo immediate surgery.

“They didn’t call 911; she was bleeding profusely. They stuck her [the mother] in their car [and] they drove up to the hospital and wouldn’t enter the hospital,” said Maryland State Sen. Nancy Jacobs.

After the failed abortions, police in Elkton, Maryland, searched Riley’s clinic and found a freezer with 35 late-term fetuses inside, including one possibly aborted at 36 weeks — nearly full-term.

Riley was arrested late Wednesday in her East Bench home. She has been charged with one count each of first-degree murder, second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder.

Her license to practice medicine has been suspended in Maryland but is still active in Utah.

“’Regarding Dr. Riley’s arrest, the Utah Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing has no comment but the division continues to monitor Maryland’s case against Dr. Riley and will carefully review the details as it moves forward to see if any further determination needs to be made from our end,” said Jennifer Bolton.
Dr. Riley signed an agreement not to perform abortions in Utah while the Maryland investigation runs its course. She is charged with murder and conspiracy.

This story from the Baltimore Sun details the unfortunate case of what is typically going on across American abortion clinics. In the article you will see that the National Abortion Federation (NAF) is calling for this abortionist and his chain of abortion clinics to be investigated. What is of interest will be the post I place after this story- detailing an older Maryland case- where NAF defends the abortion clinics. Although, it is noteworthy that NAF is calling for what the real defenders of life (pro-lifers) have been calling for – for many years- clinic investigations- the truth is that NAF makes their profits off abortion clinics. They have played the cover for these sleazy killing centers for many years. In fact, if NAF is so concerned- why are they speaking out now? This abortionist has been in this position before- and where was NAF then?

Sounding similar calls, abortion rights supporters and opponents alike say they want Maryland authorities to continue investigating a doctor and his clinic network in the wake of a botched abortion in Elkton last month that critically injured an 18-year-old woman.

The case has put a spotlight on Maryland’s abortion law, which is less restrictive than those in nearby states such as New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In those states, unlike in Maryland, later abortions must be performed at a surgical center or hospital rather than at a doctor’s office.

Maryland’s more relaxed standard appears [ wonder who helped get those “relaxed standards” look no further than NAF] to explain why Steven C. Brigham, a doctor with a checkered disciplinary history, initiated abortions for the 18-year-old and other patients in New Jersey, then had them travel to Elkton in a caravan to complete the procedures. In New Jersey, pregnancies after 14 weeks cannot be ended at doctors’ offices such as those Brigham runs; the 18-year-old was 21 weeks pregnant.

The Maryland Board of Physicians last week ordered Brigham to stop practicing medicine in the state. Brigham, 54, has never been licensed in Maryland. The board also suspended the licenses of two other doctors after the Aug. 13 abortion in which the young woman suffered a ruptured uterus and had to be flown to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore.

But Brigham’s lawyer said Tuesday that his client had done nothing wrong.

“There’s a statute in Maryland that permits licensed physicians from other states to collaborate with Maryland physicians,” said the lawyer, Kevin Dunne. “Every time Dr. Brigham was in Maryland, there was a Maryland physician collaborating or consulting with him. Every time.”

Brigham is the owner of five American Women’s Services clinics in Maryland, with locations in North Baltimore, College Park, Frederick, Cheverly and Elkton, according to the physicians’ board. On Tuesday, a woman who answered the phone at the Baltimore office said it was open. Calls to the other offices went to a call center where no information was given about their status.

The president of the National Abortion Federation, a Washington-based association of abortion providers, said Tuesday that Maryland health officials should scrutinize all of Brigham’s clinics in the state. Vicki Saporta noted that Pennsylvania health officials in July ordered him to permanently shut his four clinics in that state for repeatedly employing unlicensed caregivers.

“They need to expand their investigation and look at all of the clinics he owns and operates in Maryland and determine if they, in fact, are also providing substandard care,” Saporta said. “And if so,” she added, regulators should “close them permanently.”

Saporta said the practice of starting an abortion in one state and finishing it in another sounded like a practice from bygone decades: “This is the kind of thing you would think of when abortion was illegal.”

Meanwhile, the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue posted a letter to Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler on its website. The letter, dated Sept. 1, calls on Gansler to investigate and file appropriate criminal charges against Brigham “for the unlicensed practice of medicine and possible fraud for falsely representing to patients” that he was licensed in Maryland.

The letter, which Gansler’s office said it had not received by Tuesday afternoon, mentions the 1994 revocation of Brigham’s medical license in New York State for “gross negligence,” among other sanctions meted out over the past 18 years.

“In light of the fact that Brigham’s actions have endangered the public and because he appears to be a scofflaw on whom normal discipline has little effect, we ask that he be charged criminally and be held to full accountability under the law,” said the letter from Cheryl Sullenger, senior policy advisor.

Dunne, Brigham’s lawyer, said the Maryland board’s findings told “only a part of the story.” He also said that while New York revoked Brigham’s license and that Brigham voluntarily surrendered his license in Pennsylvania, he remains licensed to practice medicine in New Jersey.

Maryland health authorities say an investigation is continuing but said their regulatory reach was limited. “By state law, we do not and cannot license doctors’ offices,” said David Paulson, spokesman for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Doctors themselves are licensed by the Board of Physicians, and the department’s Office of Health Care Quality has oversight over more sophisticated surgical centers. But Paulson said there was no state licensing of run-of-the-mill doctor’s offices, except those with on-site laboratories.

Pennsylvania law, by contrast, gives its health authorities greater power. That is what allowed the Department of Health to order Brigham to close his doors there.

The episode Aug. 13 in Elkton led the Maryland Board of Physicians to issue a cease-and-desist order to Brigham, and to suspend the licenses of Dr. Nicola I. Riley, 45, and Dr. George Shepard Jr., 88, an obstetrician-gynecologist who has helped run the five Maryland clinics of American Women’s Services.

According to the board, the 18-year-old — who has not been identified and whose condition is not known — and two other patients were initially treated at an AWS clinic in Voorhees, N.J. Their cervixes were dilated and other initial steps taken for the abortions. The next day the women were told to travel in their own cars to Elkton, with Brigham in the lead. There the procedures were to be concluded.

The physicians’ board said the practice “potentially placed the patients at grave risk for harm and catastrophic outcomes.” In Elkton, Riley punctured the 18-year-old woman’s uterus, the board found, and she suspected she might have also injured the woman’s bowel. The patient was later flown to Hopkins, where a surgeon alerted the board.

Saporta said the National Abortion Federation has had concerns about Brigham for over a decade. In the late 1990s, she said, her group took the unusual step of asking attorneys general in Pennsylvania and New Jersey to investigate him.

While the New Jersey law limits where women can get abortions when they pass 14 weeks and enter their second trimester, she said many clinics in the state do provide abortions later in pregnancy.

“In 2010, there is no reason why women have to have their procedures started in one place and completed in another,” Saporta said. “Transporting patients across state lines — I’ve never heard of such a thing. Totally outside acceptable medical practice.”

But Dunne said Brigham performs “a very needed service” and “we believe that part of this involves clearly the right of a woman to choose.” He said Brigham would present his side of the story.

Asked why Brigham initiated abortions in New Jersey and concluded them in Maryland, and whether his patients were informed of this, Dunne said there were unspecified “medical reasons that would have to come out in other proceedings.”

Minutes after the drug entered Logan’s system, her throat tightened, restricting her breathing and cutting off oxygen to her brain, rescue records show. Eight minutes later, paramedics at the District Heights Volunteer Fire Department received a high priority call: A woman was unconscious; she had no pulse. Logan was left completely paralyzed, her brain so damaged she will never speak again, Logan later DIED.

Two years after OB-GYN Gideon M. Kioko was found by the Maryland medical board to have mishandled abortions in 1989, he surrendered his license, which allowed him to avoid punishment. In one case, the patient died three days after the abortion; in the second, the woman suffered brain damage and died three years later. He petitioned the board for reinstatement a year later but was turned down. Nearly six years passed before the board restored his license — with conditions.

In the District, however, where Kioko also was licensed, the city’s medical board did not take the same hard line. It allowed him to continue practicing after the Maryland incidents. {WHERE WAS NAF THEN??????????}

Here is an Excerpt from CBS News 60 Minutes Volume XXIII, #32, April 21, 1991, which reported on the case of Suzanne Logan:

VIEIRA: No matter where people stand on the abortion issue, pro-choice or pro-life, nobody wants back-alley abortions, certainly not Susanne Logan, who found what she believed to be a reputable clinic where she could get a legal, safe abortion. Meet Susanne Logan.

[interviewing] Do you remember going to the clinic specifically to get an abortion? [Ms. Logan nods] But you don’t — I’m sorry. You don’t remember what happened inside the clinic? [Ms. Logan shakes her head]

VIElRA: [voice-overl Today, Susanne Logan lives in a Baltimore nursing home. She is almost completely paralyzed, her brain so damaged she will never speak again. She’s now 33 and will spend the rest of her life never understanding what happened to her. Two years ago, Susanne was a waitress struggling to make ends meet when she found herself pregnant. She went to the Hillview abortion clinic in Suitland, Maryland, for what she thought would be a safe, simple, $400 abortion. Susanne was given general anesthesia. Minutes later, according to her attorney, Patrick Malone [sp?], she stopped breathing.

PATRICK MALONE, Susanne Logsn’s Attorney: Apparently, about half-way through the procedure the nurse looked at the patient’s face and noticed that the lips were turning blue, Susanne’s lips. Then all hell broke loose.

911 OPERATOR: [on the phone] Fire and Rescue.

WOMAN: Yes, this is Hillview Women’s Medical Surgical Center at 5408 Silver Hill Load. We have a patient in the exam room who has — you know, we can’t get any pulse or respiration.

VIEIRA: [voice-over] County paramedics who responded to the 911 call reported the clinic in chaos. Hillview workers lacked the right medicine to reverse the effect of the anesthesia. Their emergency equipment was broken, causing Susanne’s brain to go without oxygen for 12 minutes.

Mr. MALONE: The anesthesia was given without any monitoring whatsoever, without an anesthesiologist present, without a nurse-anesthetist present, without the normal safeguards that are part of standard, modern American medical care. I’ve seen a lot of cases and met a lot or doctors and reviewed a lot of records and I’ve never seen anything like this.

VIEIRA: [voice-over] Hillview’s owner is Barbara Lofton [sp?]. For years, Lofton posed as a psychologist and ran mental health clinics until the District of Columbia shut her down for submitting phony Medicaid bills and letting unqualified employees dispense medicine. Undeterred, Lofton went into the abortion business, but D.C. investigators again shut her down, this time for operating without a license. A few months later, she moved the clinic two miles across the state line to Maryland where there are no laws regulating abortion clinics. According to Tony Moore [sp?], a former worker at the clinic, Barbara Lofton, who is not a doctor, continued to flaunt phony professional credentials at Hillview.

TONY MOORE, former Employee, Hillview Clinic: When she first hired me, she introduced herself as “Dr Lofton” and she had a stethoscope which was quite expensive, like, about a $300 model and she wore scrubs and most of the time I saw her, she was answering the phone as “Dr. Lofton.”

VIEIRA: So all the time you were working there, you tbought she was a doctor?

Mr. MOORE: Right.

VIEIRA: [voice-over] But as we said, Lofton isn’t an M.D. and in this videotape deposition for Susanne Logan’s lawsuit, she admits she’s not qualified to practice medicine.

ATTORNEY: [deposition videotape] Have you ever been licensed as any kind of health care provider in any jurisdiction?

BARBARA LOFTON: Owner, Hillvlew Clinic: No.

VIEIRA: [voice-over] Lofton did hire licensed physicians who moonlighted at Hillview, performing up to 25 abortions a day. But when they were unavailable to handle other clinic duties, we’re told she simply took their place. Frequently, Brenda Davis [sp?], a former Hillview employee, assisted her.

VIEIRA: [voice-over] Davis says at least one doctor at Hillview would leave blank prescription pads with his signature on them.

Ms. DAVIS: Well, on one night we ran out of signed prescriptions and Barbara was, like, “Oh, I have a pad here,” you know, that the doctor signed. And I said, “OK.” So I went with her and actually what she did, she took a blank pen [sic] and she wrote his name.

VIEIRA: So she forged —

Ms. DAVIS: Yeah. She wrote his name and she said, “Don’t ever tell anyone I did that.”

VIEIRA: [voice-over] Some patients at Hillview claim Lofton has gone even further than that. This patient, Elizabeth, who asked us to disguise her identity, says that when she went to Hillview for an abortion, Barbara Lofton told her she would personally take on her case.

ELIZABETH: former Hillview Patient: She told me that she was Dr. Lofton and she told me that she would do it herself, not to worry.

VIEIRA: So you thought she was a medical doctor?

ELIZABETH: Right.

VIEIRA: [voice-overl Elizabeth is suing Hillview for a badly-performed abortion. Herb Fulcher [sp?] says his girlfriend, Linda Brown [sp?], may soon do the same thing. When he came to pick Linda up at the clinic, Barbara Lofton was waiting for him.

HERB FULCHER: She said “We had problems, accidentally hit an artery.” So I went in the back and they had a sheet wrapped around her bottom, like a baby diaper. And she was just blood everywhere covered. She was just laying in her own blood.

VIEIRA: [voice over] By the time pararmedics got Linda to a hospital, she had almost bled to death. To save her life, doctors performed an emergency hysterectomy. She was 19.

[interviewing] If they hadn’t gotten to you within 10 to 12 minutes you would have died?

LINDA BROWN, former Hillview Patient: Yes.

Mr. FULCHER: Now she’ll never have a child again. That’s what the doctor said. She’ll never be able to have children again.

Ms. LOFTON: [deposition videotape] No matter how good we are, accidents occur.

Mr. MALONE: [deposition videotape] And isn’t that something that you realized before the incident with my client? There were accidents before that incident, weren’t there?

Ms. LOFTON: One.

Mr. MALONE: And that involved a death, did it not?

Ms. LOFTON: It did, in fact.

TAM GRAY [sp?]: It’s sad to think that people can go in and have a safe procedure, what they think is safe, and die.

VIEIRA: [voice-over] Tam Gray thought when her sister went to Hillview that she would have dinner with her that night, but Deborah [sp?] didn’t make it. She died at the clinic.

Ms. GRAY: The outcome was just like a back-alley abortion.

VIEIRA: Dld they say what had happened to her that —

Ms. GRAY: They said something about anesthesia and why that was even administered is still beyond me.

VIEIRA: [voice-over] Deborah paid $200 extra to be put to sleep. Even though abortions can almost always be done with the patient awake, Tony Moore said he knows why the clinic pushed the far riskier option of general anesthesia.

Mr. MOORE: It would be more money. That’s the bottom line. It would have — it would be more money to be put to sleep or twilighted.

VIEIRA: [voice-over] Soon after Hillview gave Deborah the anesthesia, her heart stopped.

[interviewing] I’m with 60 Minutes. Could I talk to you for a minute? I mean, I’m hearing reports of prescriptions being written without a license and botched abortions and —

[voice-over] I wanted to talk to Barbara Lofton about those reports, but Lofton didn’t think there was much to talk about. Initially, neither did any of the abortion rights activists we contacted. As a reporter, I found that many pro-choice leaders knew about problems at Hillview, but didn’t want them publicized. National Abortion Federation head Barbara Radford [sp?] admitted she was just hoping we would go away.

BARBARA RADFORD, Head, National Abortion Federation: Well, I think your first reaction from us was “This is the last thing we need.” We had hoped that it wouldn’t get national publicity because of the political nature of all of this.

VlEIRA: Pro-choice activists worry that clinics like Hillview will be used against them in the bitter political battle over abortion. They fear bad publicity will prompt state legislators to start regulating clinics and that pro-lifers will then use those regulations as a backdoor way to stop abortions. So even though those laws could make clinics sater, they usually fight them.

Mr. MALONE: You have to be licensed in the state of Maryland if you want to open a junkyard and deal in scrap metal, but in the state of Maryland you do not have to be licensed if you want to open an abortion clinic and deal in human lives.

VIEIRA: [voice-over] That’s something State Senator Mary Boergers would like to see changed. She’s pro-choice, but she favors laws to make clinics safer. It’s a position that has cost her support among her pro-choice colleagues.

MARY BOERGER, Maryland State Senator: There’s only so much of a willingness to try to push a group like the pro-choice movement to do what I think is the responsible thing to do because they then treat you as if you’re the enemy.

VIEIRA: [voice-over] But Radford says regulations aren’t necessary because the state already has enough power to go after doctors who work at clinics. True, the state can investigate individual physicians, but when one doctor gets into trouble at Hillview, Lofton simply hires another one. The state can’t touch Lofton or her clinic.

Sen. BOERGER: I think we have the responsibility of coming up with some legislation if we really care about all the women of the state.

Ms. RADFORD: We want to make sure that women have choices when it comes to abortion service and if you regulate it too strictly, you then deny women the access to service.

Sen. BOERGER: When we say what we’re trying to do is guarantee safe abortions and eliminate back-alley, unsafe abortons, and yet you can demonstrate that there’s a woman who’s died and another woman who’s paralyzed, then not only that argument but all arguments from the pro-choice community can become suspect.

VIEIRA: [voice-over] There is no argument on either side that will help Susanne Logan. She spends most of her days alone in the nursing home. She rarely has visitors. Her family lives in California and can’t afford the trip to Baltimore very often.

[interviewing] What do you want now, Susanne? What would you like? [Ms. Logan picks out letters on keypad] To go home.

[on camera] On Friday, a grand jury in the District of Columbia announced that Barbara Lofton was indicted on nine counts of Medicaid fraud in connection with the mental health homes she operated in the District of Columbia. But Hillview is still open. Barbara Lofton is still running it and she denies that she or the clinic have done anything wrong. Are all clinics that perform abortions run by Barbara Loftons? No. Both the National Abortion Federation and Planned Parenthood have strict standards for their member clinics and in 11 states, there are laws governing how abortion clinics are run.

There was a myriad of events that combined to make this the worst day of her life. First, there was no one other than Kioko was present for the procedure. Next, the electricity kept going on and off during the abortion.

At noon, the patient reported that she began to feel dizzy and hot and asked Kioko for her cell phone to call her emergency contact. Kioko refused to give it to her. The patient later began to bleed profusely and Kioko told her that he would have to “Cut the baby up” to get it out, but he was unable to get the baby’s head.

Sometime after 2:00 pm, The patient then told abortionist Kioko that she could not breathe and she kept passing out, she asked Kioko to call 911. Instead of calling 911, Kioko called his wife into the clinic.
At 3:50 pm when the bleeding continued, Kioko finally called 911. When emergency officials arrived on the scene, they heard a woman screaming from the back of the office.

They told the board that:

“The woman was bleeding heavily and the baby’s head was still inside her. They reported seeing her naked from the waist down rolling back and forth on the table screaming. She was covered in blood, her legs were bathed in blood, and there were heavy streams of blood spurting from her vagina.”

She was transported to a hospital and where she had to undergo numerous surgeries to correct the procedure.

Gideon Kioko, M.D. v. Maryland State Board of Physicians, (Case No. CAL07-01912,Circuit Court for Prince George’s County). Dr. Kioko appealed the Board’s decision permanently revoking his medical license for his incompetent medical and surgical care of two female patients during abortion procedures. Both patients suffered extensive injuries during the procedures performed by Dr. Kioko, including a perforated uterus, and cervical and vaginal lacerations. One patient also suffered disseminated intravascular coagulopathy, hemorrhagic shock, retained fetal skull and vertebral column. The other patient suffered a perforated bladder, and extensive lacerations of her colon and rectum that required a colostomy. The Board had previously sanctioned Dr. Kioko in 1997 after the deaths of two other female patients who died as a result of anesthesia complications during abortion procedures that he performed. After briefing and oral argument in July, 2007, the circuit court affirmed the Board’s decision.

Two years after OB-GYN Gideon M. Kioko was found by the Maryland medical board to have mishandled abortions in 1989, he surrendered his license, which allowed him to avoid punishment. In one case, the patient died three days after the abortion; in the second, the woman suffered brain damage and died three years later. He petitioned the board for reinstatement a year later but was turned down. Nearly six years passed before the board restored his license — with conditions.

In the District, however, where Kioko also was licensed, the city’s medical board did not take the same hard line. It allowed him to continue practicing after the Maryland incidents.
When the board decided to act in 1996, it ignored an administrative law judge’s recommendation to revoke his license. Instead, it placed him on probation, fined him $5,000, ordered community service and banned him from performing abortions in the city for five years. Three months later, the board lifted the abortion ban after a request from Kioko.

“I think they did the right thing,” Kioko said in a recent interview. “They should have just left me alone.”

Kioko, 65, maintained at the time that he did nothing wrong and in neither case was responsible for the anesthesia that was blamed for the problems. “The old story about me was completely twisted,” he said in a recent interview.

In addition to the two deaths in Maryland, which prompted about a dozen people to write letters to city officials urging them to revoke his license, Kioko also had settled a $1 million malpractice lawsuit in 1995 filed by a female patient.

The D.C. medical board reinstated Kioko to unrestricted status in 1999 in an order signed by then-Chairman Robert T. Greenfield Jr., a physician who previously shared a practice with Kioko for 19 years, according to Kioko and board records.

Greenfield, who no longer has a medical practice with Kioko, said he recused himself from board deliberations. But because he was chairman, he said in an interview, “I had to sign it. He came before the board, we looked at his record and . . . deemed him fit to practice.”

Kioko said his working relationship with Greenfield did not play a role in his reinstatement.

In August, the medical board received a new complaint about Kioko from Northeast Washington resident Thakerya Drayton, 21, who was referred to Kioko’s clinic when she sought an abortion in 2001.

“I didn’t know anything about him,” she said in an interview.

After the procedure, she said, Kioko sent her to the recovery room for about an hour. “I knew something wasn’t right because of the pain,” she recalled.

When she got home, she was “bleeding out of control,” she said. After a few days, she told her mother, who called an ambulance that took her to Howard University Hospital.
Hospital records state that Drayton suffered an “incomplete abortion.”

Kioko said an incomplete abortion is considered a surgical complication and shouldn’t warrant a complaint to the medical board.

“I know the medical board will respond if they think there’s a serious deviation in standard of care,” he said.

The medical board sent Kioko a letter in September with a copy of Drayton’s complaint and added that he was not obligated to respond. He said he remembers her handwritten complaint.
“Her letter was so poorly written, I couldn’t understand what she was complaining about,” he said.

Kioko said he responded to Drayton’s complaint in December but heard nothing from the board until he contacted it March 17 after being questioned by The Washington Post about the complaint.

James R. Granger Jr., the board’s executive director, told him that the case was closed, Kioko said.

Drayton said that six days later, she received a letter from Granger stating that the case was closed with no action to be taken against Kioko. The board found no evidence of a violation of city law “that would warrant disciplinary action,” Granger said in an interview. It was the first time Drayton had heard from the board since filing the complaint six months ago.

“I thought we would have a meeting with the board and Dr. Kioko,” she said. But the board, she added, was “no help.”

A group of anti-abortion organizations yesterday called for criminal prosecution of a Severna Park doctor facing disciplinary action today for a 2006 abortion that led to the death of a woman.

Members of the Living Hope for Life and Defend Life held a news conference in Baltimore to urge the Maryland Board of Physicians to severely discipline Dr. Romeo A. Ferrer.

The state board has previously found that Ferrer failed to meet the standard of quality care in the 2006 incident. It will decide how to punish him in a case resolution conference in Baltimore today. He faces various disciplinary sanctions that could include revocation of his license, suspension or reprimand, as well as a fine.

The anti-abortion groups will forward their complaint to the county State’s Attorney’s Office to see if the doctor’s conduct can be classified as criminal gross negligence. The office has yet to receive any information on the case, a spokeswoman said.

“Even if you don’t share our group’s view on life … you would want such malpractice out of the marketplace,” said attorney Matt Paavola, who is working with Defend Life. “Perhaps you share the same reason for having an abortion (as the patient), but you don’t want practitioners who are so careless that the woman dies.”

Calls to Ferrer’s office were referred to the communications office at the National Abortion Federation in Washington, D.C.

Spokeswoman Melissa Fowler said abortion is one of the “safest and most commonly provided medical procedures” and that credit for its safety record can be attributed to the “specialized quality care provided by clinics like Gynecare Center,” where Ferrer had an office.

“We value our patients and strive to provide the highest quality care,” Fowler wrote in an e-mail. “To preserve our patients’ privacy and confidentiality, we do not release details about their care.”

On Feb. 3, 2006, a 21-year-old woman went to Ferrer’s office at the Gynecare Center in Severna Park seeking an abortion. The unidentified Baltimore woman was 16 weeks pregnant, had a 3-year-old son and previously had two abortions without suffering any complications, according to the Board of Physicians’ complaint.

She sought an abortion because she couldn’t afford another child and came with a female friend because her family did not know about her pregnancy.

The patient signed a form authorizing an abortion procedure that used anesthesia and medication as necessary, but Ferrer, according to the board complaint, advised the staff that general anesthesia is not used at the clinic. The facility uses “conscious sedation,” referred to as “twilight sleep.”

The abortion was completed by 1:45 p.m., but a surgical assistant later noticed that the patient’s fingernail beds appeared blue. The staff was unable to get the patient’s blood pressure or pulse and performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

They called 911 shortly before 2 p.m. The woman was taken to Anne Arundel Medical Center in Parole, where she was pronounced dead by 2:57 p.m.

In August 2007, the woman’s estate filed a complaint with the board claiming that Ferrer failed to properly administer pain medication and didn’t monitor her respiration and ventilation correctly.

The Board of Physicians referred it to a peer review organization to investigate, which resulted in a complaint issued on April 7.

The investigation found that Ferrer failed to meet standards of quality medical care by not properly administering anesthesia, failing to provide intra- and post-operative anesthesia monitoring, and failing to provide adequate resuscitative efforts.

Members of the anti-abortion group said this case shows the need for more scrutiny of facilities like the Gynecare Center.

“I hope one day these same (state) officials have to look this innocent young man in the eye and explain how they decided that veterinary clinics deserved more oversight and regulation than the facility that killed his mother,” Jack Ames, director of Defend Life, said in a statement.

After the botched abortion on Suzanne Logan, was left severely paralyzed following her abortion at the Hillview Women’s Medical Surgical abortion clinic in Suitland Maryland the clinic’s administrator Barbara Lofton told the Washington Post, in an article entitled, 2 Tragedies Raise Doubts About Suitland Clinic;Abortion Patient, Left Paralyzed, Files Suit:8-13-1990 , “If you provide a certain number [of abortions], no matter how good you are, no matter what the qualifications are, there are sometimes circumstances. There are probably no facilities without some complications.” And in response to accusations that the clinic did not know how to handle an emergency situation-she had this to say, “Obviously, the report from the paramedics was written by a pro-life person. There were many fabrications in the report.”

Did you hear the “CONCERN for women from the National Abortion Federation here? This pro-choice organization is about PROFIT – MONEY- and PROMOTING ABORTION – NOt Patient Safety !

Let’s recap – the 60 Minutes reporter on the case of Suzanne Logan said that, “I wanted to talk to Barbara Lofton about those reports, but Lofton didn’t think there was much to talk about. Initially, neither did any of the abortion rights activists we contacted. As a reporter, I found that many pro-choice leaders knew about problems at Hillview, but didn’t want them publicized. National Abortion Federation head Barbara Radford [sp?] admitted she was just hoping we would go away.

BARBARA RADFORD, Head, National Abortion Federation: Well, I think your first reaction from us was “This is the last thing we need.” We had hoped that it wouldn’t get national publicity because of the political nature of all of this.

The a Black Woman dies in 2006, and the abortionist refers reporters to the National Abortion Federation, of which he is a member, and NAFSpokeswoman Melissa Fowler said abortion is one of the “safest and most commonly provided medical procedures” and that credit for its safety record can be attributed to the “specialized quality care provided by clinics like Gynecare Center,” where Ferrer had an office.

Fowler tries to persuade us that NAF “values our patients and strive to provide the highest quality care.”

I Maintain, botched abortions, 911 calls, abortion deaths, and abortion injuries ARE NAF’s Highest form of care given their record in Maryland alone !

It is time the legislature tightens regulations here – womens lives hang in the balance !